Listening to Our Users: 50+ Interviews Shape DeHub
By DeHub Team — 2021-03-30
Alongside the first beta, we ran more than 50 one-to-one user interviews. Not a survey, not a Discord poll — actual calls, one person at a time, mostly with people who had the app installed and were already using it.
It is a slow way to gather information and it does not scale. It was also the single most useful thing we did that quarter.
Why not a survey
Surveys tell you what people are willing to say about themselves in ninety seconds. They are very good at confirming what you already believe, because you wrote the questions.
An interview is harder to steer. You ask someone to open the app and show you what they normally do, and within a minute you are watching them skip past the thing you spent six weeks on. You cannot argue with that, and you cannot design a survey question that would have surfaced it.
What came out of them
A few patterns showed up often enough that we stopped treating them as opinions:
- Wallet setup was the wall. Not the app, not the concept — the wallet. People who understood exactly what we were offering still gave up during setup. That finding has outlived every other part of the 2021 product and still drives how onboarding works today.
- "Earning" needed to be legible. Users did not want a yield they had to model. They wanted to know what an action was worth before they took it. Anything that required a spreadsheet was treated as a trick.
- Nobody asked for more tokenomics. Not one interview produced a request for a more complex token. Several produced requests for a simpler one.
What we got wrong
The interviews also killed things. We went in confident about a set of social mechanics that tested badly enough that we cut them rather than ship them — people understood them and simply did not want them. That is a cheap lesson at fifty interviews and an expensive one at fifty thousand users.
We also learned that our own enthusiasm was not evidence. Several features survived internal debate purely because everyone on the team liked them, and the interviews were the first outside pressure they had ever faced.
Why we still do it
The format has changed since — ambassador calls, creator sessions, direct messages that get read properly rather than triaged — but the principle has not. Talking to a small number of real users carefully beats talking to a large number of them shallowly, and it beats talking to none of them entirely, which is the default in this industry.
Product-market fit is not a milestone you clear once. It is a thing you keep checking, and the checking only works if you are willing to hear that you were wrong.
Why the findings kept coming back
The uncomfortable postscript is that the biggest thing these interviews surfaced — wallet setup as the point where people give up — was still the most common complaint about DeHub three years later, when a major app upgrade in 2024 drew almost all of its criticism on that exact issue.
That is not a failure of the research. The research was right in Q1 2021 and right in Q3 2024. It is a reminder that identifying a problem and solving it are separated by a great deal of work, and that a finding you agree with is very easy to acknowledge and postpone.
We now treat any complaint that survives a full rebuild as structural rather than as a backlog item.